Why I built MonkStreet

I bought Amazon in 2013 and I still own it. I bought Nvidia years before most people could pronounce CUDA and I still own that too. Those two positions, more than anything else I have ever done in markets, are responsible for the shape of my financial life.

They were qualitative calls — bets on management, on optionality, on what kind of place a company is to work at. They were right for reasons a spreadsheet would have had a hard time capturing in 2013.

I am telling you this up front because I don't want you to mistake what follows for an argument against instinct. My instinct has been very good to me. Gut is real.

But here is the thing nobody warns you about when they sell you on "just trust your gut": the hard part of a great investment is not buying it. The hard part is holding it.

Gut, on its own, is not enough to hold with

When Nvidia dropped 50% for the third time, what let me stay in wasn't a feeling. Feelings, at that moment, were actively trying to get me to sell.

What let me stay in was being able to point at something outside my own head — something that didn't care how scared I was that week — and say: the numbers still look like the numbers of a winner. Quantifying your conviction is not about replacing judgment. It's about giving judgment a floor to stand on when the market is busy trying to shake you off your best positions.

The mirror image of this is the reason I eventually had to build MonkStreet at all. I want to tell you about a stock called Teladoc.

For a while, Teladoc was one of those companies with a perfect story. Telemedicine was going to eat healthcare. The pandemic had just made video doctor visits normal. Every podcast I listened to, every thread I read, every smart person I followed was circling the same idea: this is the future, and you are early.

I bought it.

Then I bought more.

I watched it climb, and I felt like a genius for about two glorious weeks. Then it started to fall, and I held, because the story was still perfect. And then it fell more, and I held, because now I was anchored to a price that no longer existed. By the time I sold, I had lost more money, faster, than on any single position I had ever owned.

A long time later, once I had built the thing I'm about to tell you about, I went back and ran Teladoc through it at the peak of its price.

The score came back as 3 out of 100. Three.

The growth was unprofitable, the quality metrics were ugly, the balance sheet was a problem, and the market had priced it as if none of that mattered. The numbers had been screaming the whole time.

Here is what Amazon and Teladoc have in common: in both cases, I was making a qualitative, story-driven bet. The difference is that with Amazon, the quantitative picture quietly agreed with me through every drawdown, and I could lean on it when my nerve was failing. With Teladoc, the quantitative picture was in open revolt, and I never checked — because the story was too beautiful to check.

This is what I mean when I say gut needs a floor. Not a cage. A floor. Something underneath you that tells you whether the stock you are about to fall in love with is a company like the ones that have historically rewarded patience, or a company like the ones that have historically punished it.

When gut and floor agree, you get to hold through a 50% drawdown and come out the other side. When they disagree, you at least get to notice — instead of spending eighteen months defending a thesis to yourself in a voice that sounds suspiciously like hope.

I didn't need a more beautiful story. I needed something to stop me from believing the beautiful ones without checking.

If there is a right answer, go find it

Once I accepted that I needed a quantitative floor, the next question got interesting. What should the floor actually be?

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I read What Works on Wall Street by James O'Shaughnessy. It reorganized how I think about investing in a way almost no other book ever has.

The argument, boiled down: if you test investment strategies rigorously across decades of real market data, most of what people tell you about stock-picking turns out to be folklore. A small number of factors — the ones with real statistical backbone — keep working, quietly, across market regimes, across decades, across everything.

What hit me hardest was the implication. Qualitative investing is hard to improve because you can't really measure it. Two smart people can read the same 10-K and reach opposite conclusions, and neither of them is wrong exactly — they're just human.

But quantitative investing is different. Quantitative investing has a right answer. Not a right answer about the future — nothing has that — but a right answer about what has actually worked, on real data, for real companies, over a long enough window that luck runs out.

If there is a right answer, I wanted to find it. Not a right-ish answer. Not a right-for-my-personality answer. The boring, rigorous, grown-up version — the one that holds up when you apply proper statistical tests, and resist the temptation to overfit.

Because here is the thing about a floor: if you are going to trust it to hold you up through a Nvidia-sized drawdown, it had better actually be solid.

A sloppy floor is worse than no floor. A sloppy floor is just a more confident way to be wrong.

That became the project.

What MonkStreet is

MonkStreet is the floor I wish I had in 2013, and in 2016, and on the day I bought Teladoc.

It's a research platform built around a single number we call the MonkScore. The score runs from 0 to 100, and it answers one question: how closely does this company, right now, resemble the companies that have historically gone on to beat the market?

Under the hood it's 149 financial factors grouped into five pillars — Growth, Profitability, Quality, Conviction, and Safety — validated across 25 years of North American market data and more than 141,000 company-quarter observations. I'll write the methodology post next, with the statistical tests and the charts and the honest caveats. This post is not that post.

What I want you to understand here is simpler. MonkScore is not a prediction. It's a mirror. It takes the accumulated lesson of what has actually worked in markets for a quarter century and holds it up next to a company and tells you, without flinching: this one looks like the winners, or this one looks like the losers, or this one is somewhere in the middle.

A Teladoc at its peak would have come back as a 3 out of 100. I would still have had to decide what to do with that. But I would not have been able to pretend the numbers agreed with the story.

Who this is really for

I didn't build MonkStreet for institutions. I built it for a specific person in my head, and his name is Oscar.

Oscar is a friend of mine from school. He's doing well in life. He has two kids, a real job, and the kind of calendar that doesn't leave room for reading twenty annual reports before dinner. He genuinely loves investing — he'd read 10-Ks all weekend if the world let him — but the world doesn't let him, and the honest truth is that most of his stock ideas die not because they were bad ideas, but because he never found the time to check them properly.

Oscar is the first person who used MonkStreet and he fell in love with it immediately. He told me the thing that made me know I had built the right product:

"I can tell in ten seconds whether a stock is worth my research time, or whether I should just drop it and move on."

That was the whole thing. Not "tell me what to buy" — he's a grown-up, he wants to make his own decisions. Just help me stop wasting hours on companies the data already says are a bad idea.

If you are Oscar — if you love this stuff but the hours don't add up — MonkStreet is for you. If you are a professional advisor who doesn't have the infrastructure of a giant firm but wants research that stands up to scrutiny, it's for you too.

One honest caveat. MonkStreet does not predict the future. Nothing does. A stock with a MonkScore of 100 today is a company whose fundamentals look like the ones that have historically outperformed — a meaningful statement about the past and the present, not a promise about next year. The score is a starting point. It tells you where to look and where not to waste your time. The actual work of deciding what to own, at what size, for how long, with what thesis — that is still yours. It should be. That part is what makes you an investor.

Come in

Go to app.monk.st and give it a try. Look up a stock you own, or one you've been thinking about, and see what the score says.

If the score agrees with you, good — the numbers are on your side. If it disagrees with you, even better. That is the conversation I want MonkStreet to start.

The full methodology post — with all the backtests, statistical tests, and honest caveats — is coming next.

Until then, happy investing!

— Alberto (The Investing Monk)